HENRY

The British Psychological Society blog is reporting on research showing that autistic children are “immune” to contagious yawning:

Footage of the children taken while they were watching the videos showed, as expected, that the non-autistic children yawned more during and after seeing a video of a person yawning, than after watching a control video. By contrast, the children with autism yawned no more after seeing a yawn video than after a control video – they appeared to be immune to the contagious effects of yawning. This remained true even after the researchers controlled for the effects of age and intelligence.

David Premack reviews the differences between animal and human cognition in “Human and animal cognition: Continuity and discontinuity” (doi). Abstract only:

Microscopic study of the human brain has revealed neural structures, enhanced wiring, and forms of connectivity among nerve cells not found in any animal, challenging the view that the human brain is simply an enlarged chimpanzee brain. On the other hand, cognitive studies have found animals to have abilities once thought unique to the human. This suggests a disparity between brain and mind. The suggestion is misleading. Cognitive research has not kept pace with neural research.

Neural findings are based on microscopic study of the brain and are primarily cellular. Because cognition cannot be studied microscopically, we need to refine the study of cognition by using a different approach. In examining claims of similarity between animals and humans, one must ask: What are the dissimilarities? This approach prevents confusing similarity with equivalence. We follow this approach in examining eight cognitive cases—teaching, short-term memory, causal reasoning, planning, deception, transitive inference, theory of mind, and language—and find, in all cases, that similarities between animal and human abilities are small, dissimilarities large. There is no disparity between brain and mind.

Update: That would be David Premack not Daniel Premack. My apologies!

Out of body experiences have long been a staple of books about alien abductions and things like The X-Files, and they’ve also been reported after certain types of neurotrauma including seizures and drug abuse. Two research groups are reporting today in Science that these can be experimentally induced, by the use of virtual reality helmets. The subjects were wearing helmets that fed video from behind them into the display, so that each person was viewing themselves from a location a few meters behind themselves.

In the first experiment, Lenggenhager et al stroked the backs of the illusory and real subjects. When the stroking of the illusory and real backs was simultaneous, the subjects reported a stronger experience of being outside their body, than when the stroking of their real backs did not coincide with the stroking of their illusory backs.

To follow this up, the experimenters then blindfolded the subjects and moved them around in the room. When asked to move back to their original location, the subjects tended to drift to a location between where their real body had been, and where their illusory body was. The drift towards the illusory body was greater when there had been simultaneous illusory/real-back stroking. Taken together, these results suggest that the strength of the illusion was probably a result of the concurrent experience of visual and tactile stimuli. (More info: abstract of Video Ergo Sum: Manipulating Bodily Self-Consciousness, doi).

In the second experiment, by Ehrsson, the experimenter first simultaneously poked the subject’s real chest and the same location on the “virtual” chest. This meant that the subjects experienced the feeling of being poked, at the same time as they saw their illusory body being poked (I get the same feeling whenever I use facebook). Again - these results suggest that it’s the correlation  between visual and tactile experience that strengthens this illusion.

To track this down further, he measured the emotional response to this by skin conductance,
when the subject’s illusory body was hit with a hammer. When the real body was poked at the same time as an illusory hammer hit, the subject’s conductance response was greater than when the real body poke did not coincide with the hammer hit. This suggests that the people were responding emotionally to this illusory body. (More info: EurekAlert, Abstract: The Experimental Induction of Out-of-Body Experiences, doi).